Web Hosting Explained for Newbie

For beginners it is really difficult to find a right web host. It is just similar to the situation when one is from another country and don’t know about it and further problem arises when he/she needs shelter on rent. Here as a fellow needs a shelter one’s website needs a web hosting. Thus in order to know the concept of web hosting and its types it is better to discuss them one by one. There are several types of web hosting available like shared hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and collocation hosting. Now we are going to take them one by one.



Shared Hosting



In case of shared hosting several websites share single server and its resources. This type of hosting is generally preferred by small or normal e-commerce businesses. However this type of hosting is not at useful for popular sites having much traffic, as there is no sufficient web space.



Dedicated Hosting



In case of dedicated hosting user rents a server from a web hosting provider and the user will be placed at his/her web hosting provider's data center. The data center use to provide all necessary software installation and connection to Internet. The advantage which is generally seen in this type is that the website owner has full control over the server as here in this case website is not shared by anyone. In other words in case of dedicated hosting only one user is hosted on the server machine and have a full privilege over the server to manage it by him/her self. However the server machine here belongs to the web-hosting provider only.



Collocation Hosting



This type of hosting contains all the features similar to dedicated hosting however the difference lies in the fact that in case of collocation hosting user needs to provide his/her own server and web hosting provider just helps to plug it into his/her data center. In this type of hosting, user needs to install own software and hardware.



Reseller Hosting



In this type of hosting the account owner has the privilege to allocate the web space and bandwidth access and resell them to his/her clients. Here reseller hosts act just like a middleman and is generally not responsible for any software or hardware installation. The only work they do is buying web space and reselling it to clients.



VPS hosting



VPS or Virtual Private Server is almost the same as dedicated server. Due to its similarity it is also known as Virtual Dedicated Server. Here in this case the account owner gets the feeling as if he/she is owner of dedicated server. However in reality in this type of hosting a physical server is separated into several independent hosting spaces or VPS-es, each isolated from the other. Now this enables user to create and manage multiple sites and domains and take full control of VPS with root/administrator access which allows one to access the virtual hard disk, RAM and to reboot one’s private server independently from other VPS-es.



Domain Name



Now after knowing the different types of hosting we are taking another important concept known as "domain name". Domain name is just a normal web address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) which one types in the "address" area when one opens a browser example expert.com. The specialty of domain name is that they are unique and are assigned just to one person at a time. Domain name is actually corresponding with numeric IP address. Thus every domain name will have its numeric IP address example, the IP address for expert.com is 92.16.133.108



Now the word dot Com stands for commercial. Thus when a user sees .com, .org, .net or others, which ends after the final dot or period (.) of a URL, it is known as top-level domain. The utility of these is that it tells about the nature of website indirectly. There is several domain name extension seen today like .org, .net, com. And in addition there are many to come soon as well.



After domain name next important thing is Country Level Domain Name example expert.com.my. This ". my" is its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). And .my represents the country "Malaysia”. It is worth to note that different countries have different ccTLD.



Thus the above are some of the things, which make one beginner bit familiar with the web world.